Review: Victor Lundy: Sculptor of Space

Abstract

Victor Lundy: Sculptor of Space U.S. General Services Administration, Washington, D.C., 2014, 49 min., http://www.gsa.gov/portal/content/185759 The life and career of architect Victor Alfred Lundy (b. 1923) have been long and varied. Born in New York City to Russian immigrants, Lundy studied architecture at New York University before World War II and with Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design after the war. His first buildings are considered part of the so-called Sarasota school, although their soaring, scooping, and generally curvaceous forms were far more expressionistic than those designed by Lundy’s fellow Harvard and Sarasota school colleague Paul Rudolph (1918–97). After Sarasota, Lundy moved back to New York and established a practice that produced everything from a church in East Harlem to an IBM headquarters in New Jersey to the snack bars at the 1964 New York World’s Fair. In the mid-1970s, Lundy headed west to California and then settled in Houston, where, at ninety-one, he still lives today (Figure 1). Figure 1 Victor A. Lundy examines the oversized cover page of a set of drawings for the Student Health Center at the State University of New York at Cortland (1967), in his studio in Houston, Texas, 2013. This documentary film, freely available on the U.S. General Services Administration’s website, is the tenth and latest in the GSA’s Historic Building Film Series. Since 2002, the series has documented the rehabilitation and preservation of properties owned by the GSA that are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. As required …